Home » Reading & Literature » Canadian Literature » Urban Cowboy or Urban Legend: The Myth of the Cowboy Image

Urban Cowboy or Urban Legend: The Myth of the Cowboy Image

© Paula E. Kirman

As a kid, on weekend afternoons I used to watch those old cowboy movies that were always on. I would witness John Wayne, or some other box-office star, decked out in chaps and a ten-gallon hat, single-handedly taking on rough and tumble gangs. Those images branded in my mind cowboys as the epitome of the strong, silent masculine figure, saving damsels in distress and riding off into the sunset.

This image is very far removed from the fact of real cowboys lives, men who worked the ranches (far from Hollywood) in a quiet and solitary way, but were in no way as glamorous as the movies and novels would have us believe. Brock Silversides sought to expose the "cowboy myth" with his book Shooting Cowboys: Photographing Canadian Cowboy Culture 1875-1965 (Fifth House). Silversides, an audio-visual archivist with the Saskatchewan Archives Board, has a keen interest in the history of Canada. He is the author of other photographic collections such as The Face Pullers: Photographing Native Canadians 1871-1939 and Waiting for the Light: Early Mountain Photography in BC and Alberta.

"There are far more photographs of the non-ranch cowboy than any other sort of cowboy," says Silversides of his book, which he compiled from photographs at various museums and archives in Western Canada and annotated with his research. "I found that a little bit disturbing because Hollywood movies and western novels have really changed our viewpoint of what the cowboy is. I think that is especially so for Canada, because the American cowboy is so mythologized and unfortunately we've always piggy-backed on the cultural mythology of the Americans."

Ted Stone, a noted Western Canadian historian and editor of several books about cowboys (such as Red Deer College Press' 100 Years of Cowboy Stories) feels that the cowboy myth is even stronger on the Prairies than anywhere else. "There is a whole romance of the cowboy, living in unfettered freedom, close to nature beyond the confines of civilization and unhindered by law and social conventions of any kind. Even the Prairie itself, with the wide open spaces lends itself to that sense of freedom. I think people look at cowboy life sort of longingly," he says.

Shooting Cowboys is organized in sort of a downward slope, going from photographs of real cowboys working on the ranches, through to cowboy entertainers, and finally ending up in a section of who Silversides termed "cowboy poseurs" -- people who weren't really cowboys but who benefited from the cowboy image and, as he terms it, "put on cowboy costumes," such as cheerleaders and figure skaters.

The copyright of the article Urban Cowboy or Urban Legend: The Myth of the Cowboy Image in Canadian Literature is owned by Darren Anderson. Permission to republish Urban Cowboy or Urban Legend: The Myth of the Cowboy Image in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.